Contact Center Workforce Management: The Complete Guide

Contact center workforce management (WFM) is among the most valuable tools in the current CX landscape. More than just a solution for optimizing schedules, the right WFM software can help businesses improve employee engagement, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

While WFM tools aren’t a new concept in the contact center, their value has increased drastically over the last few years. A combination of technological evolution, rising customer expectations, and changing workforces means businesses need more efficient ways to align their people and resources strategically. That’s where WFM technology comes in.

Here’s your complete guide to the benefits of contact center workforce management, how it’s evolved over the years, and how to select the right solution for your business.

What is Contact Center Workforce Management?

Workforce management (WFM) is the strategic process of managing people and resources within a business environment, often using technology like scheduling and tracking software. Contact center workforce management adapts this process to the unique needs of the CX landscape.

Though countless companies and groups in the business world leverage WFM strategies, the contact center particularly relies on workforce management in 2024. Leaders are now facing challenges like handling adaptive staffing levels, hybrid work environments, omnichannel customer engagement, and increased attrition among staff.

Moreover, customer expectations have evolved, with 72% of consumers saying they expect immediate service across various channels. Business leaders need strategies to make the most out of their resources while keeping costs low.

A successful contact center workforce management strategy helps companies optimize staffing needs to deliver excellent experiences consistently. These companies also get the tools they need to manage payroll and workflows, create better environments for employees, and reduce turnover.

Key Features of Contact Center Workforce Management Software

Contact Center Workforce Management software provides businesses the tools they need to handle their “WFM” needs. The features of this software can vary. Some CCaaS vendors build workforce management tools into their contact center platforms. Others offer integrations with standalone solutions.

Overall, WFM technologies are designed to help companies make the most of their resources, keeping costs low without jeopardizing customer satisfaction or employee experience. Most of the top solutions will include tools for:

Staff Forecasting and Scheduling

Forecasting and scheduling tools form the heart of most WFM software solutions. Businesses must ensure they have the correct number of employees available on the proper channels and at the correct times. However, scheduling is complex because of customer trends, business demands, and seasonality.

Contact center workforce management tools allow companies to leverage historical data to predict their potential needs and create comprehensive workforce plans. They can track calls and contact requests over specific periods, making arranging specific schedules for certain contact center channels and demands easier.

Some solutions can even use AI to account for various other factors, such as potential spikes in demand caused by the launch of a new product. Since WFM solutions can often integrate with scheduling and calendar tools, it’s simple to distribute schedules to employees, regardless of whether they’re operating in the office or remotely.

Real-time Monitoring and Tracking

Aside from using historical data for scheduling and forecasting, contact center workforce management solutions can often leverage real-time data, too. They can track important information about the number of hours an employee works, their productivity, and absences in the workforce.

This helps optimize payroll budgets and operational costs and ensures businesses get the most value from their teams. Some solutions can also make it easier to keep employees engaged and focused by monitoring performance metrics, which can be shared with both supervisors and employees in real time.

They can also help ensure employee adherence to specific workflow processes, like using call center scripts or following compliance guidelines. This allows businesses to ensure their team members take the proper measures to perform efficiently without compromising security and privacy.

Day-to-Day Management

Even with exceptional planning, processes in the contact center don’t always go according to plan. That’s why most leading contact center workforce management tools come with “intraday” management capabilities. These allow companies to track essential metrics and rapidly adapt to changes in the workplace.

For instance, if a scheduled employee calls in sick, a leading workforce management solution can suggest ways to fill the “gap” as quickly as possible. They might suggest asking another staff member to cover a shift or provide access to on-call agents.

Modern workforce management software can also give companies real-time insights into the status of employees. This means managers can check on staff throughout the day (regardless of location) and see how they spend their time. This paves the way for intelligent decisions about organizing and distributing future resources.

Reporting and Analytics

Reporting and analytical tools in a contact center workforce management solution make understanding crucial performance data in your workplace easier. Managers can gain insights into essential company metrics and merge this data with other insights from their call center software.

These reports help businesses make intelligent decisions about scheduling team members, where to deliver training and support to specific staff members, and even how to route calls.

Reporting and analytical tools can also assist businesses with operational planning, helping them determine where to hire new staff members to retain high service quality levels.

The Benefits of Contact Center Workforce Management

Contact center workforce management strategies and technologies deliver a host of benefits to organizations. They go beyond helping to organize the contact center to provide business leaders with critical resources that facilitate growth. The right strategy and software can:

• Simplify scheduling: Innovative WFM software with AI and automation tools can simplify the scheduling process. They can generate optimized schedules instantly, factoring in agent availability, call volumes, business needs, and potential disruptions.
• Ensure adherence: WFM solutions don’t just ensure you have the correct number of agents available. It also ensures you assign suitable agents to the proper channels and tasks and helps you track their adherence to SOPs, compliance standards, and more.
• Improve training: Insights from WFM technology can show supervisors and business leaders where contact center agents need extra support. Tracking KPIs like first-time resolution rates makes it easier to determine which teams need more training.
• Enhance agent experience: Workforce management solutions can ensure you’re not overwhelming specific employees with complex schedules while failing to take full advantage of other resources. This improves agent experiences.
• Optimize customer experience: Ensuring you have the correct number of agents available on every channel leads to better first-call resolution rates, lower waiting times, and higher levels of customer satisfaction, improving your ability to compete in the CX landscape.
• Reduce labor costs: As well as reducing the risk of understaffing, WFM solutions can help to prevent overstaffing, ensuring your company isn’t spending money unnecessarily. It can help you pinpoint the team structure you need to reach your CX goals.

Optimizing Contact Center Workforce Management in 2024

As the contact center and consumer journey has evolved in recent years, so has the WFM landscape. Successful workforce management strategies today go beyond simple schedule optimization. With the right resources, businesses can use technology to gain a crucial edge in a competitive environment.

Here are some best ways to optimize your contact center workforce management strategy in 2024 and beyond.

1. Choose the right WFM software

While it’s possible to manage a contact center with spreadsheets and calendars manually, this is often time-consuming and complex. Dedicated contact center workforce management software and WFO tools simplify the process for business leaders.

They offer a combination of all the tools you need for workplace analytics, scheduling, intraday management, and more. Plus, they can often align with the tools your workplace already uses, from contact center software to ERP systems and CRM platforms.

Popular WFM solutions include:

• NICE WFM: An all-in-one platform linked with the NICE CCaaS platform. NICE WFM includes real-time KPI monitoring, automatic workload forecast, AI-powered algorithms, trend and seasonality detection, and multi-skill scheduling.
• Verint WFM: An intelligent workforce management solution with AI-powered forecasting and scheduling tools, generative AI coaching, quality and compliance features, and simplified employee planning systems with self-service portals.
• Dialpad WFM: Connected with Dialpad’s contact center solutions, the platform offers quality management, agent scheduling, forecasting, and real-time analytics. There are even dozens of AI tools to help optimize your schedules and empower staff.
• Nextiva WFM offers robust tools for forecasting call and contact volumes, improving agent performance, and scheduling agents. You can also track every interaction and contact history for in-depth insights into your future business needs.
• Zoom WFM: An intuitive tool built into the Zoom collaboration and communication portfolio. Zoom WFM combines customizable reports with a drag-and-drop user interface, interaction scoring, artificial intelligence, and quality management.

2. Empower Your Employees

Contact center workforce management strategies are excellent at improving customer experiences. However, they’re also a valuable resource for enhancing employee experiences and optimizing the productivity of your workforce. Leading WFM solutions will allow you to:

• Distribute educational resources: A WFM solution can make it easier to distribute educational resources, like knowledge base articles, guides, and documentation, to employees. They can also help create a repository of learning resources for team members.
• Empower teams with self-service: Self-service portals within a WFM solution allow team members to manage their shift swaps, request time off, and even track their performance metrics in one unified environment.
• Deliver coaching and support: 87% of contact center leaders are now prioritizing “upskilling” their staff. WFM solutions can help companies deliver real-time coaching from supervisors or AI bots, providing onboarding sessions and more.

3. Leverage In-Depth Analytics

As mentioned above, reporting and analytical tools are among the most valuable resources in contact center workforce management software. Now more than ever, it’s crucial for businesses to take full advantage of these insights.

Identify the core metrics and KPIs you want to track within your contact center initially, from “First Call Resolution” rate (FCR), to Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and average handling time (AHT). Then, ensure your WFM software gives you the tools to monitor these metrics.

Ideally, the right platform should allow you to gather and use historical metrics and monitor real-time insights into customer experience and team performance. Use your insights to decide how to structure your contact center going forward. Some solutions will even include AI systems that offer suggestions for improving your scheduling strategy.

Remember to account for “call center shrinkage” when analyzing your scheduling needs. This means thinking about how everything from scheduled and unscheduled time off to coaching, training sessions, and team meetings will affect your team’s availability.

4. Take Advantage of Automation

Managing a contact center workforce might be simple enough when you’re running a small business. However, keeping everything running smoothly becomes more difficult as your organization grows. Automation gives you an excellent way to streamline repetitive tasks.

Leading contact center workforce management tools have built-in solutions for building automated workflows. They can automate things like:

• Tracking adherence: Monitoring schedule adherence, compliance with standard operating procedures, and other crucial metrics to protect your workplace.
• Schedule management: Automating processes like shift bidding, shift swaps, and time off approvals based on pre-set rules and triggers.
• Routing: Distributing calls and service tickets to agents based on their skills, availability, and other factors to improve customer experiences and agent efficiency.

To get the best results, look for workforce management solutions that allow you to customize your automated workflows based on the processes in your contact center. For instance, many leading solutions will allow you to build automated schedules that monitor agent skill levels and ensure customers are assigned to agents based on their ability to solve problems quickly.

5. Invest in AI-Driven Tools

Artificial Intelligence is influencing virtually every aspect of the contact center. Companies aren’t just using AI to enable self-service with generative AI chatbots. They’re also embedding AI solutions into their workforce management tools.

Within contact center workforce management software, AI solutions can help you forecast scheduling needs more effectively using machine learning and historical data. They can surface trends and insights from reports, streamlining intelligent decision-making. They can expand your business insights, giving you overviews of customer and employee sentiment and engagement.

AI tools can automatically score calls based on quality assurance metrics, monitor for potential security and compliance threats, and analyze customer intent to optimize routing methods. Plus, generative AI systems built into WFM and WFO technologies can also allow companies to build “agent assistants” who deliver real-time coaching, guidance, and support to modern workers.

Mastering Contact Center Workforce Management

Effective contact center workforce management is crucial in today’s rapidly changing world. It’s more than just a way to ensure you’re making the most of your available resources while keeping operational costs low. The right strategy and software can help you deliver faster, more personalized, and more engaging customer service on every channel.

It can help reduce customer churn, increase loyalty rates, improve the agent experience, and optimize your team’s productivity. What’s more, with the right solutions, you can gain the insights you need to allocate resources more effectively and make better growth decisions.

State-of-the-art WFM tools and resources empower every business to optimize its contact center for the evolving customer experience landscape.

FAQ

What is workforce management in a call center?

Workforce management, or WFM, is the strategic process of aligning people and resources to address specific business objectives. WFM strategies help to optimize and automate scheduling, performance management, and customer service delivery in the contact center.

What is contact center management?

Contact center management is how companies manage the daily operations of their workforce and software to deliver exceptional customer experiences. It often involves using various tools, from analytical and scheduling systems to Workforce Management software.

What is the role of workforce management?

The purpose of workforce management is to allow companies to optimize the productivity of their employees and make the most of their resources. WFM helps you forecast labor requirements and create shift schedules that ensure you can reach your business goals.

What are the four critical pieces of WFM?

While WFM software is constantly evolving, most solutions will include solutions for forecasting, staffing (human resources), scheduling and rostering, and analytics or reporting. Some systems also include solutions for automation, traffic management, routing, and more.

Why is WFM important in a call center?

Call center or contact center workforce management is essential for streamlining and improving employee scheduling, time tracking, and future planning. It also helps to optimize productivity, reduce risk, and improve customer and employee experiences.